Some writers explain Indian religion as the worship of nature spirits, others as the veneration of the dead.
But it is a mistake to see in the religion of any large area only one origin or impulse.
Assuredly both these lines of thought-the worship of nature and of the dead-and perhaps many others existed in ancient India.
By the time of the Upanishads, that is about 600 B.
C.
, we trace three clear currents in Indian religion which have persisted until the present day.
The first is ritual.
This became extraordinarily complicated but retained its primitive and magical character.
The object of an ancient Indian sacrifice was partly to please the gods but still more to coerce them by certain acts and formulae.
Secondly all Hindus lay stress on asceticism and self-mortification, as a means of purifying the soul and obtaining supernatural powers.
They have a conviction that every man who is in earnest about religion and even every student of philosophy must follow a discipline at least to the extent of observing chastity and eating only to support life.
Severer austerities give clearer insight into divine mysteries and control over the forces of nature.
Europeans are apt to condemn eastern asceticism as a waste of life but it has had an important moral effect.
In India no religious teacher can expect a hearing unless he begins by renouncing the world.
Thirdly, the deepest conviction of Hindus in all ages is that salvation and happiness are attainable by knowledge.
The corresponding phrases in Sanskrit are perhaps less purely intellectual than our word and contain some idea of effort and emotion.
He who knows God attains to God, nay he is God.
Rites and self-denial are but necessary preliminaries to such knowledge: he who possesses it stands above them.
It is inconceivable to the Hindus that he should care for the things of the world but he cares equally little for creeds and ceremonies.
Hence, side by side with irksome codes, complicated ritual and elaborate theology, we find the conviction that all these things are but vanity and weariness, fetters to be shaken off by the free in spirit.
The ascetic sitting in the temple court often holds that the rites performed around him are spiritually useless and the gods of the shrine mere fanciful presentments of that which cannot be depicted or described.
Rather later, but still before the Christian era, another idea makes itself prominent in Indian religion, namely faith or devotion to a particular deity.
This idea, which needs no explanation, is pushed on the one hand to every extreme of theory and practice: on the other it rarely abolishes altogether the belief in ritualism, asceticism and knowledge.